thank you. i'm sam sachs i'm in for tom hartman in washington d.c. and here's what's coming up tonight on the big picture. conservatives are trying to ignore four hundred years of american history and their soul against affirmative action and luckily for them they have friends on the highest court in the land just a moment what happens affirmative action in america is struck down also after president obama's lackluster debate performance last week the polls have tightened

up but will the romney ryan ticket stick to the same strategy in tonight's vice presidential debate as in will paul ryan live for forty minutes and if you get deathly ill and you have no insurance don't worry because mitt romney says you'll get the treatment you need no matter what but apparently he didn't hear about the forty five thousand americans that died last year because they had no health insurance. so earlier this week a bunch of us americans had the day off for columbus day now let's put aside for a moment that columbus day is actually a day commemorating a genocidal maniac who natives called a cannibal whereas the blood of millions on his hands ruined who made a ton of money selling slaves and trafficking sex with young girls let's put all that aside so we don't endanger our precious day off from work next year now another way to look at columbus day though is to say it was the start of the white man's foray into the so-called new world

a world that was already occupied. if you decades later europeans from spain settled in st augustine florida then came the settlement of jamestown virginia by the british in sixteen zero seven and during this time white settlers ruthlessly push native americans farther and farther west also around this time the slave trade picked up and over the next three centuries twelve million africans were put on ships sold to white european settlers in america and forced to work as slaves with no human rights whatsoever as we know the slavery and usurpation of native american lands continued long after the revolutionary war was fought and all the while white men in america were starting businesses acquiring property accumulating wealth passing that wealth on to future generations that acquired more property open more business is an accumulated more wealth to pass on to more future white generations of african-americans on the other hand were slaves who own no wealth and had no economic rights what economic rights excuse me whatsoever for the most

part african-americans were not starting businesses accumulating wealth and property and passing on the riches to few future generations as slaves the work they did up until the civil war only in rich white people and even after the civil war was fought in slavery abolished the situation for african-americans only improved slightly jim crow laws segregation institutional racism violence all conspired together to keep african-americans and other minorities from having an equal standing with whites in the american economy. then the one nine hundred sixty s. came in the civil rights era to challenge the status quo acknowledging the blatant racism in our economy in one nine hundred sixty one president john f. kennedy signed executive order one zero nine two five which created the committee on equal employment opportunity and force to businesses that were receiving federal funds to remove any racial biases in their hiring decisions in that executive order for the first time the words affirmative action were used to describe the steps

that should be taken to give minorities equal standing in the economy than in one thousand nine hundred sixty four the civil rights act was signed into law prohibiting all kinds of the discrimination based on race color religion or national origin but president lyndon johnson knew that wouldn't be enough to remedy more than three hundred years of racial subjugation and nine hundred sixty five he gave a speech at howard university on why affirmative action is necessary saying quote you do not wipe away the scars of centuries by saying now you are free to go where you want to to do as you desire and choose the leaders you please you do not take a man who for years has been hobbled by chains liberate him bring him to the starting line of a race saying you are free to compete with all the others and still justly believe you have been completely fair this is the next and more profound stage of the battle for civil rights we see not just freedom but opportunity not just legal

equity but human ability not just equality as a right and a theory but he equality as a fact and as a result. the same year president johnson signed executive order one one two four six and forcing affirmative action for the first time by requiring government contractors to take specific and documented measures to ensure equality and their hiring decisions universities be candid began taking specific steps as well to enroll much more minorities and it worked in one nine hundred fifty five less than five percent of college students were african-american but after decades of affirmative action policies by nine hundred ninety that number climbed to eleven point three percent and while the courts have since ruled that racial quotas that universities are unconstitutional university admissions are still allowed to consider race to promote more diversity on campus the point of all of this is affirmative action works despite recent efforts by conservatives to destroy it but just two generations since john kennedy first coined the term just two

generations since he said affirmative action at least in our universities affirmative action is on the verge of being struck down by the united states supreme court the case is fisher averse the university of texas and the issue at hand is whether or not the university can use race as an admissions criteria to foster more diversity on campus. and by the way arguments went on wednesday in front of the court that appears the five conservative justices are poised to deliver the final blow to affirm about action it appears that despite white people having a four hundred year head start in the american economy conservatives will argue that two generations just two generations of affirmative action have leveled the economic playing field enough so no longer do we require affirmative action policies so that's what's going on down the street at the supreme court now for more marilyn schuyler joins me now she's an affirmative action attorney at the schuyler affirmative action practice and board member of the american association of affirmative action marilyn welcome to show thanks thanks for coming on so you

filed an image this brief in this case on behalf of the university of texas. as far as the plan the plaintiffs are names abigail fisher yes what what premises is her argument built on and how are they false in your opinion what's interesting she filed the case she was denied admission to the university she claims because of her race in actuality she may not have actually been admitted even if that had not been a factor but the claim by by her team is that this was a constitutional rage that she should have been given that opportunity to compete and not have race taken into account so she was denied admission she's actually already graduated from college at this point when you briefly mentioned i mean there's there's a question over whether or not the supreme court should be even taking up this case that she was she was a three point five and i don't want to these are pretty good scores i mean she had eleven a.d.r.'s eighty she was three point five nine g.p.a.

those are good but they're below the median at the university of texas so regardless of race she might not have been accepted in the supreme court has previously ruled that a plaintive can't be in federal court unless there is a quote actual or imminent harm and not hypothetical harm so do you think that the . the conservative justices in deciding to hear this case and going to their own president specifically did this to eventually strike that down i think that's possible that's certainly our fear but it was interesting that that was one of the first questions raised by justice ginsburg and the issue wasn't given a lot of play in the briefs because i think both sides felt that the issue of standing had already been settled before we got there but it was raised as an issue and there is an argument to be made that there is constitutional harm and when that occurs you don't have to have the actual injury so as far as the standing here this goes back to two thousand and three. what to do specifically that case that

you can you can take race into account with if it's part of a plan to have a critical mass of minority students in other words you you want your academic environment to be as diverse as possible or at least to have enough diversity so that those people who are in minority groups are not feeling isolated or representative of that group but isn't that exactly what the university of texas is doing yes so what is change in the last nine years since that ruling that would give the supreme court any justification whatsoever to overturn that well there was a time when the university was prohibited from taking into account race so what they did was they instituted a ten percent plan this plan admits all the top ten percent of every high school in the state of texas and those students come in one of the arguments that's being made by fischer's council is that this has increased the diversity on the campus

enough so that no further measures are needed but what the university of texas found is that these measures were not enough to get a critical mass of minority students in specific programs so this plan was instituted to take into account not just race but a whole there are several different factors about a dozen. different factors that are taken in accounting cluing leadership musical talent other types of things and barriers that they've had to overcome and race is just one of those factors as is gender and and other characteristics so. we've had the courts previously ruled that quotas are unconstitutional right if they no go ahead and they strike down this idea of using race as admissions criteria to promote diversity. then what's left i mean is that the end of any sort of affirmative action at least on the college campus as we know it but i hope not i think that you know at least affirmative action as it's practiced in the federal

contracting community is done a little bit differently and it has a lot to do with expanding your. recruitment and making sure that you're getting a diverse pool of applicants in the academic setting it's a little more complicated there are so few slots and it's so critical that we have diversity at this level in particular because we need a diverse workforce coming from the academic level academic institutions are going to have to scratch their heads a little harder it's been very challenging to get to diversify the student population at campuses where it is been prohibited to campus diversity has declined the main argument i keep hearing from proponents is diversity diversity diverse and that's a pretty strong argument i mean it's hard to argue that diversity is a bad thing you don't hear the argument anymore so much that this is a socio economic issue but this is about. trying to get african-americans on

a level economic playing field after hundreds of years of discrimination and being locked out of the economy. is that argument argument still be made moving forward is still an effective arguments or does that only kind of make it sound like you're making a case for quotas and whatnot all that's that's one of the arguments that's being proposed by the other side is you know can't you look at socioeconomic status as a proxy for minority status and you know we don't think that's a really good idea because what'll happen is you end up with a campus where the minority students are you know in the lower socioeconomic status and you want to have diversity on all levels and not have that representation being so tied to socioeconomic status so decision in a few months i guess we're probably respected ok we'll keep an eye on the story marilyn thanks a lot thank you very much thank you. coming up after the break president obama's strategy in his first debate was simple get some shuteye and hope romney comes

across as a full we all know how that turned out now it's time for the vice presidential debate so what should we expect. download the official publication so choose your language stream quality and enjoy your favorite. t.v. is not required to watch on t.v. all you need is your mobile device. any time.

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welcome back to tonight's vice presidential debate between joe biden and paul ryan the corporate media has gotten what it wants we now have a horse race for the white house here's the most recent polls not that they matter because they will change nationwide gallup has romney now edging president obama with a one point lead and battleground ohio rasmussen shows president obama's lead cut down significantly significantly excuse me to just one point forty eight to forty seven and virginia romney is now leading forty eight to forty seven in new n.b.c. wall street journal poll and in florida a poll out of the university of north florida gives president obama a four point lead forty nine to forty five so clearly mitt romney's debate strategy last week which was to live for thirty eight minutes and paint himself as

a moderate worked he's back in the race and will probably secure some big by. from a few more billionaires willing to make investments in him now there's a chance he might actually win whereas the president's strategy with strategy which seemed to be to let mitt romney walk all over him didn't work so what will tonight's debate do for the race and is there any chance that the issues that really matter to americans but that don't seem to want to talk about might actually come up let's turn it over to the panel coase is the senior online editor at the daily caller and richard fowler is a progressive strategist and host of the richard feller radio show welcome to you both think i'm going to do it so this is is right i'm going to adopt their only strategy in just shake the chair before he goes on stage well ryan will adopt the romney strategy i think i mean they they saw it was successful for them that they come out that they hit hard that any time that obama in this case biden comes out with something that they perceive as wrong for the country they'll pounce they will

have now are just one part of the other part of the strategy was completely walking back all the positions he had taken in the last there's no question that romney i mean even amongst republicans is not considered the perfect candidate but here we are is what we have and this is a guy who's running for the office on the republican ticket and he has he recognizes that in order to capture and this is sort of what that forty seven percent video ended up showing and i've talked about this before is that he recognizes that there's a middle of the country who doesn't want to hear that obama's evil they just want here that look he's in over his head he's failed in his responsibility for this country and i can do a better job and and we know already in the interviews a paul ryan's given he didn't come out today and say look i like joe biden i like this vice president but i think that his policies have failed and i'm planning on taking over richard is this ticket to move to the center is that something egregious or is that politics as normal well sadly sam it's politics as normal for the republican party they're going to try to censor arises debate but i think the problem they're going to problems when you center at the debate the first i'm going

to have is you have a whole tea party wing of this party of the republican party that wants their policies and their solutions at the forefront. and you know they're not going to answer if they go to the center beyond that i think is a lot of american people that are questioning what is the mitt romney paul ryan plan they want to provide five trillion dollars in tax cuts to the american people but they don't want to tell you how they're going to pay for it and then they say it's budget neutral there's a lot of question that have to be answer tonight and all to make an answer or that's a good question i mean romney tried to run as far away as he could from this plan i mean he claims it's not a five trillion dollars tax cut the math kind of says otherwise if you do it twenty percent tax cut across the board that equals five trillion that isn't a partisan that's just straight up and i asked also it's also a cognitive dissonance you are leaving out the fact that he intends to lower tax rates and also bring up tax revenue by virtue but we closer the loophole that and creating wealth i think but isn't it only hope there's reasonable dynamics i mean that is as the president's been saying and as as that is their tax relief and has

their tax plan changed since the first debate so that there won't be as much dissonance as you said in the second debate here with rather be you know there will continue to be dissonance this is part of this is partisanship the left will continue to accuse them of lying about how and on a second where i think we're keeping them alive and for good reason because we're asking them to provide the american people to sit fix on what they plan on putting and what they plan on getting rid of to pay for their five trillion dollar tax cut in their two trillion dollar defense buildup and they don't have answers to either what you're going to see tonight sam inventors for from joe biden is joe biden going to go out there he's going to articulate to the american people what is really at stake here what's at stake for the middle class how do we grow this economy from the middle and not trickle down because we know trickle down does not work and ryan's only answer to that is trickle down is the only answer because in the process of the problem the path to prosperity budget he put forward which mitt romney called a marvelous thing all they want to do is slash a lot of government programs that benefit the middle class of the working class in this country in exchange for tax cuts for millionaires and billionaires and i think

that's how they're going to grow the economy what do you want fortunately for that we saw under george w. bush that doesn't work. what do you make of the goal though for why would why would ryan come out with such an audacious plan as you as your as your friends are going to tax cuts of millionaires and letters that's the goal that they think that this is even make sense i mean look here's the reality here's the reality of this and by the way i'm not i'm not in your position i'm not a partisan i recognize that ryan and the romney ryan one of the vents during the summit your way out the romney ryan plan obviously has holes in it and when you talk about these things and the reasonable thing that we can talk about is that when they say they're going to close loopholes they really haven't addressed specifics and there's a reason for that this is politically toxic to try and do that because there's a lot of industries and a lot of voters who are waiting so they see the reality they don't have the same time though the same time you can get all you want but at the same time when it comes to the path to prosperity i think that ryan is being honest there with the prospect of a lot some place but ryan's way out there and it's plain but that's that's that's when you're running on there's no there's no hollowness to the reality that we are heading towards a fiscal cliff and the only ticket this really looking to address that right now is

the republican ticket there's no question of us as you say and this is part of the problem the problem that you have is you have the president who's laid out specifically was going to for the past the next four years what he's done in the past four years and you have robert who says look we're going to shake up we're going to etch a sketch this we're going to keep changing we're going give no specifics we want you to elect us based on what we think we might do hillary clinton said on the two thousand and eight she had a great saying about this talk about the progress of obama at the time but she said they want hope and change to the skies are going to open up and put less still open change or in their case prosperity and freedom is going to rain down and there's the middle class that is going to grow abundantly and that's just not true this is about a debate tonight is the one who's got the challenge tonight he's got the record he's got to come out and prove that for whatever reason he deserves another forty second so that's a tall their army and a look here biden will commit a gaffe he's the guy they want to listen they're not listening he's a guy who knows a set the way the world is on his shoulders after president obama's performance

last time biden knows it's on him and when he gets when he gets our leadership and everything we've got ten seconds mitt romney changes position on india a risk. and with indefinite detention he said he was cited now he says that he'll review it as he just trying to appeal to some civil libertarians and iran and even address the issue i haven't. found it with richard thank you for coming on. before you watch the debate tonight there's something you have to understand about the media's coverage of debates and that is the media will completely determine what you learn from tonight's debate or at least they'll try to if you let them here's tom explaining how you can avoid it. a new study out of ohio state university shows that viewers of presidential debates are more affected by the frame in which the media puts the debates and we are by the actual performance or words of the debaters themselves to figure out how this works researchers showed young americans clips from the two thousand and four and two thousand and eight presidential debates the viewers were then given media coverage of the debates to read one group was given coverage focus strictly on policy like why each candidate

took the position they took what affects those policies would have on the nation and so on important stuff that we as americans should be getting out of the debates the other group of viewers was given media coverage that framed the debate as a sporting event which candidate won who appeal better to that bloc of voters that kind of stuff the political horse race stuff after all that the debate viewers were then asked to describe the debate as if they were telling a friend what happened and here's what the researchers learned in this study the media coverage had a strong effect on whether the viewers engaged in policy reasoning even though they were all exposed to the same clip viewers who read the media article with the game frame emphasizing who won the debate listed the fewest policy reasons in their description of the debate those who read the article with the policy frame listed the most policy reasons as the lead author of the study re pingree concluded the media have a strong influence on whether viewers think of the debate in terms of

a discussion of the issues or simply as a competition between the candidates. now. we know ahead of time which will corporate media will frame tonight's debate we're going to frame it like a game or a boxing match already they're asking questions who's going to win who is going to lose this debate i think and the any knockout punches low blows painful zingers already they're asking how each candidate will appear will appeal to certain blocks of voters been very little talk of policy so far heading into the debate in fact corporate media has framed this entire election like a game just like they have for many elections before this they cover politics like a horse race to jack up ratings because gladiator competitions draw more eyeballs than policy discussions since the corporate media is beholden to corporate advertisers and must be holding to ratings they have to frame their coverage as a sporting event rather than

a walkie discussion about policy even though walky discussion about policy is actually what our nation needs right now policy is also what the media used to be really good at before it lost its way in the corporate world we don't know what questions will be asked in the debate tonight we can hope that they will be focused on policy on the stuff we need to know stuff like how mitt romney's plans to replace obamacare will lead to seventy two million americans losing their health insurance or how romney plans another massive tax cut for the super rich folks like himself twenty percent you know or how president obama plans to stop the loss of american manufacturing jobs and how that might conflict with the fact that his administration is negotiating the transpacific partnership you know another free trade agreement this is just a few of the really important policy questions that probably won't be asked but if they are we should be focusing on but assuming for the moment that this debate does have some substance and will enlighten americans as to the situation that our

nation is in. it's important that you know how the corporate media will bury all of that with their game frame as soon as the debate is over. if you want to know about the issues that really matter and watch for that media spin and ignore it. oh that is a bad habits when you think about none what do you think of probably vows of poverty lives of honesty and undying devotion to god of rights well you probably don't think of unknown as a beer stealing thief but that's exactly what one nun might be and it was all caught on tape a woman dressed as a nun can be seen in security tape footage removing a beer from the fridge and place him under her habit she then goes to another

fridge and takes another beer and again places it under her habit well it's impossible to know whether or not the woman is a real non you have to wonder why would a nun still appear in the first place some viewers of the now viral video have suggested that a nice cold one is while it's cheaper than holy water while others have suggested that the could be non might have been doing a good deed by purchasing the beer first them teenagers or something and in a related story lindsay lohan is auditioning for sister act for. ok after the break mitt romney says that if you don't have insurance don't worry about it because the oh so generous hospitals will pay for all your health needs yeah right we know romney's plan.

even in the. triage.